“You can let us out,” Taban said as she pulled up ISF Corvus with shaky hands. “It’d be better to, anyway.”

“In a moment,” Park said, trying to concentrate. How long did it take for a message to reach the other side, again? Eighteen hours—and then there’d be more time needed, of course, for ISF to actually send out their reinforcements. The Deucalion still wouldn’t see any help for weeks. But it was all they had.

“You’d better do it quickly,” Taban said, his voice still perfectly polite. “We don’t know how it’s going to affect you if they turn those neural inlays back on. Especially when the unity rain hits again.”

“What—what do you mean?” Park whirled then. “We’re off the planet—there is no unity rain!”

“We told you,” Taban said calmly, “it affects the area around the planet, too. That’s how we ended up here in the first place: our ship fell through a hole in space. And it is the end of the season. The ripples are always the biggest then.”

“When is it going to hit?”

“We’re not sure,” he admitted. “Probably very soon. Minutes. Seconds. You can already feel its effects, the way you can feel static in the air before a thunderstorm. You haven’t noticed?”

She began to fumble with the console screen, swearing, though the blood was leaping in her brain and her slippery hands couldn’t do much. SOS. Send ships ASAP. Mutiny on the ship: Severov, Chanur, Xu, and Boone responsible. Commander Wick dead. Others frozen. Need help now. They are trying to take us and the HARE (Taban) hostage and reunite with their families. Sagara, Park, and Fulbreech still alive. WE NEED HELP NOW OR—

Something slammed into her head again.

Park opened her mouth to scream. It was the same sensation she’d felt with Hunter in the bridge, the same feeling she’d had in the freezer, magnified by a thousand: it felt as if something was looking at her, something with a million eyes, and she felt the scalding blast of its regard sweeping through her, delving into her cells, searing the folds of her brain. A caustic, nauseating cold shot up from her bones. It felt as if she was being plunged into an acid bath—as if a thousand hot yellow lights were being shined into her head.

“Jimex!” she tried to say, hysterical—she could not see him through the veil of tears in her eyes. “Jimex, help me—”

No answer, but she could see Taban’s figure, wavering before her like a mirage. She tried to move toward him, but found that she was paralyzed; a lightning rod had been jammed up her spine and it was holding her rigidly in place. If she moved she thought she would collapse to the ground.

“Taban?” she said—or thought.

“The unity rain,” he answered, his voice deep and ringing. “Don’t fight it. Let it take you, like a riptide. If you resist it, it will destroy you. Let it carry you instead.”